My mum taught me how to be cruel in a way that cuts in the absolute deepest way possible. And I picked that up, I used to be a cruel person, using the things she taught me to hurt other people in ways you’d never want to think of. Everyone has things they’re deeply insecure about, and if you know what they are, you can exploit them to feel powerful in yourself and gain control over others.
But if you’re not a narcissist — i.e., if you have empathy beyond objective psychopathic observation — then what you could instead take away from that is how fragile and sensitive people are, and how close that makes you emotionally. The darkness that you feel may be very different to what I feel, but the mental chains that bind us both are made of the same stuff: Shame, doubt, and worry. Our insecurities have different roots, but we still experience them in roughly the same way.
Narcissists, like my mum, will wield this knowledge to try and dismantle other people in a way that seems personal and targeted. But it’s simpler than that: their attacks are as careless as a toddler swinging a tennis racket, blindly lashing out until they get a successful hit. It can seem clever, but all they’re doing is running down a list of things that they know have hurt people in the past.
Once they hurt you, they’ll know it, because we show how we feel in unavoidable ways. But that’s not a bad thing, that our pain is so readable. Everyone is aching to connect to other people when it comes to one’s own insecurities. We want them to be talked about, in a way, because if someone else feels the same way, or can even acknowledge what we’re experiencing without feeling the revulsion we presume they would, then we can get past it. Certain people will pretend that your insecurities are disgusting, but they’re just human.
The insight that kicked off this post was when I realised that a big part of why I’m so attuned to this part of myself, as in, why I’m so familiar with my own vulnerabilities, is that they were used so often against me.
And in my experience, there’s only 3 paths you can take after that:
- The harm they’ve done destroys you entirely, not just the vulnerable parts. Its toxicity eventually seeping into all of you like a boundless cancer. That’s where I was, a while ago.
- You purposefully destroy the part of you that was vulnerable, leaving most of you intact but living with buried trauma that never really stops causing harm, like a bone fracture that’s healed back the wrong way. Part of this approach is still within me now, and through all my seeking, I don’t think I’ve found a way to fully recover all of what’s been taken from me.
- You learn exactly what the mechanisms at work are, why they exist, how they hurt you, and where you can go from there. This is what therapy does, it teaches you why you have pain, how to understand it, and ultimately how to disarm it, so that you can move on. This is the approach that I default to now, though it can sometimes take a conscious effort not to fall back to one of the other methods.
Without the suffering I never asked for, I wouldn’t have pushed myself to get past it, which taught me, by necessity, how to examine myself and all my internal processes. I don’t think that being thankful for abuse, in any form, is an effective strategy for getting past it. But for me, I’m almost glad it was so bad, and the destruction it caused was so deep, because it made me feel like I had no choice but to become someone who could fix themselves.
And with that came my writing, which I love, and which blossomed out of the swamp of mental decay that I was previously drowning in. If my mum hadn’t tried so hard to be spiteful, I’d never have reached the point where I know how create the words that can expose her, and people like her.
But more than that: Perhaps I’d never have got the chance to look at myself so deeply. People tell me that the things I enjoy exploring most with them aren’t like the stuff that other people talk about, like I’m seeing, or at least looking for, something deeper. And I guess that’s true. When you’ve seen yourself entirely, naked and vulnerable, then it probably changes how you look at other people a bit too. Everyone is naked and vulnerable, deep down. And that’s OK.